Michael Johnstone wrote:
Is there any actual quantitative research on grammaticality judgments
that could tell us whether such judgments are evenly distributed along
a scale of grammaticality or whether they tend to cluster at certain
points (e.g. +/?/?*/*) in a semi-categorical way?
Say, if you asked 100 informants to mark the grammaticality of 100
sentences on a scale of 0-9, would there be a sudden shift in
grammaticality judgments along the informant axis? along the sentence
axis? (Assuming you'd selected the informants and the sentences in
some 'representative' way, that is...)
If forced to categorise a sentence as grammatical vs. ungrammatical,
are there any sentences where 50% of informants would go each way?
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An article by Bard, Robertson, & Sorace may be of interest:
Bard, E.G., D. Robertson, & A. Sorace. 1996. Magnitude estimation of
linguistic acceptability. Lg.72:32-68.
Kevin R. Gregg
Momoyama Gakuin University
(St. Andrew's University)
1-1 Manabino, Izumi-shi
Osaka, Japan 594-1198

Michael Johnstone asks
> Is there any actual quantitative research on grammaticality judgments . . .
Since Wayne Cowart's book has already received a well-deserved plug, I will
take this query as an excuse to plug my own book, which covers many of the
issues that have been raised in this discussion, both about the use of the
notation and about the nature of the judgements that it is supposed to be
reporting. The experimental literature on how people judge/report
grammaticality is virtually as old as Chomskyan syntax itself, and I survey
it in considerable detail. Here's the reference:
The Empirical Base of Linguistics: Grammaticality Judgments and Linguistic
Methodology. U. of Chicago Press, 1996.
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Carson T. Schutze Department of Linguistics, UCLA
cschutzeucla.edu Box 951543, Los Angeles CA 90095-1543 U.S.A.